never getting off the (under)ground

The JSTOR Daily Digest recently highlighted an article in the history of technology journal ICON, on pneumatic tube systems. The article documents Beach's system in NYC for human transportation, highlighting the social, economic and political reasons it never really got "off the (under) ground".

The article looks great and I have downloaded it to read - if you can't access a copy but would like to read it too, let me know by email and I will forward a PDF through my library.

Image of Beach's system by Scientific American - Scientific American - March 5, 1870 issue, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27708042

travel by tube "a thing"

The Hyperloop continues to make news and continues to be linked to pneumatic tubes. See the latest in this article in Automobile, which calls the Hyperloop a "series of powerful pneumatic tubes", or the human equivalent of the plastic tubes in bank drive-thrus.

Image from Kevin Krejci's Flickr, used under the Creative Commons lisence.

posting wishes into the abyss

The London Design Biennale, the first ever, took place over a few weeks at Somerset House last month and lucky visitors were be invited to meet a rather special series of pneumatic tubes. The theme was "Utopia by Design" and what better example of this than the beautifully dystopian/utopian pneumatic tube system.

Archinect reports on Turkey's contribution, the installation in the Biennale of The Wish Machine, by Istanbul based Autoban: a tunnel made of transparent hexagonal pneumatic tubes. The tubes are situated in a mirrored space, amplifying the effect of the multiple passages of the messages that are passing through. Visitors have a chance to write their own notes, their own hopes and wishes for a utopian future and feeding them into the Wish machine. Just like throwing coins into a wishing well, the final destination of these notes will remain a mystery.

The website reports that the installation was "inspired by the cultural tradition of threading a note or momento to the branch of a tree as an act of hope born out of hopelessness".

Thanks to Jess for first letting me know about this!

Unfortunately I cannot find any images from the exhibition which are free to share (please let me know if you have any!). There are however lots of great images on the online platform Archinect, as well as De Zeen.

The installation was at the Design Biennale 7th to 27th September 2016.

sent via atomic fairies and unicorns

Plenty of pneumatic tubes have been captured on Kodak film, although unlike today's camera, the smartphone, it would have been difficult to make the kind of videos I reported on last week with a film camera.

It turns out that Kodak was using pneumatic tubes themselves, but for a very strange purpose - to transport nuclear tests as late as 2006. They had their very own nuclear reactor which was housed in a "closely guarded, two-foot-think concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters" in Rochester New York, according to this Gizmodo report. Reminiscent of the fantastical contemporary art installation in Paris recently, it was "fed tests" by pneumatic tube system, with no employees ever making contact with the reactor. In a sarcastic wink to the fact that humans are always mixed up with technologies, Gizmodo report that apparently the system must have been operated by "atomic fairies and unicorns".

Thanks again to Long Branch Mike for sharing with me another fascinating piece of pneumatic tube pneus.

Flickr image by Asja Boros used under the Creative Commons lisence.